Lessons from the Story Match, #2

Even writers with 40 years’ experience feel self-doubt: Another thing I noticed was that Dean Wesley Smith pushed himself to write, and that he never assumed that what he produced would be publishable. By the sixth day of his challenge, he had repeatedly expressed amazement that the story he’d produced worked for his very experienced beta reader. And this was encouraging. If someone who had produced so much quality work could doubt that what he created had worked, then all those times I’d felt the same way were perfectly normal. It also meant that it was more important than ever that I not rely on myself to judge the quality of each piece of work I produced. Damn, that last was going to be a hard ask when I didn’t have a writing group to turn to. I guess I’m going to have to rely on my readers to let me know what they like and don’t like—after all, they’re the ones that matter.